Transferring data from one hard drive to another

[MikeH]

I hope this is the correct forum to ask this seemingly odd question.
Put simply, when data is deleted it is still on the drive with an instruction that it can be overwritten. Correct? Now if, due to age of the drive and the probability of it failing, I transfer everything from the old drive onto the new, is the deleted data transferred along with the un-deleted data? Or is it only the current data that is transferred?
Mike

 

[muckshifter]

No!

The 'erased data' will not be copied over to the new hard drive using conventional methods.

Basically, and I mean basically, the 'delete' operation marks the file area clear to be used again. The 'File Allocation Table' (FAT or MFT) will no longer point to that data. Therefore it should not be copied over to the new drive.


There were/are disk copying tools that can copy cluster by cluster that will copy all data irrespective of its technical state on the drive. We, err, cough cough, used such software to 'copy' floppy disks way back in the day.

 

[MikeH]

Thanks for that. I was just wondering because I was looking at my folders of photographs the other day, in thumbnail view. This, as you know, displays all the folders slightly larger than list view, and within the folder icon it shows 3 or 4 thumbnails of photos that are inside the folder. What was strange was some of the thumbnails were of photos that had been deleted from those folders (and the recycle bin) months before. Amazed, I opened the folders to find the photos were in fact not there. Hence my original query, thinking that this digital stuff is not what it seems.